Sweetpea was my first self contained game- I’d been noodling around with Twine on and off for some time beforehand, but generally to enhance other projects or D&D campaigns, not really as anything stand alone. I wrote up a post-mortem (with sub-headings, as it direly needed those), which does go into most of my immediate thoughts after hurriedly shoving it out the door with the rest of the SpringThing entries when the deadline sauntered on over.
Having had a fair number of reviews (quite a lot more feedback than I’ve gotten in awhile or expected, I was thrilled and am still very excitable whenever I see a mention to it’s name or a full review out in the wilds of the forums, my dear sweet friends have been putting up lovingly with me abruptly cheering during our conversations), and a little more time to think it all over…
I think I’m very pleased by the fact that most people seem to point to the writing as the strongest factor, and comment on how it seems like I’ve done a good job in writing in the gothic tradition- I consider myself a poet, writer, artist, and general creative (mucking around with making chip tune-y songs, poking at coding, small things I pick up for fun and am not as good at) in that order, and the gothic is an area I’ve spent a lot of time studying in and writing for in both an academic and personal context. So, yay, good to hear that that panned out!
I’m also so happy that people found Michael eerie, as mean as I feel for being pleased people were unsettled, hahaha. My absolute favourite bits of writing in Sweetpea were the Michael components, after all- body horror and making the surreal supposedly familiar (but not really, as the reader is disjointed by the conflict of how accepting the characters are, versus the reader being very aware weird hijinks are afoot) are some of my favourite toys in my toybox of writing tropes and tools.
I am a little surprised people felt there was a decent amount of choice in it, (it was a linear story really, though I did try to not go for the whole CLICK SOLELY TO CONTINUE cardinal sin of Twine, apparently). Also, I was surprised to hear a few people apparently thought it had been written with some form of state tracking- unfortunately no, I wasn’t sophisticated enough to do that, and the snarl of writing out individual passages and linking them led to the one big (not gamebreaking, thank goodness) error with the study loop. But I mean, it apparently faked the job well enough, hahahaha. In the future I’d look into that more, it seems to be pretty convenient.
The criticism I got I mostly am not really surprised by, and agree with- in terms of layout accessibility/colour choice, confusion on which links progressed the plot versus which were brief side jaunts before braiding back into the main thread, a bit of oddness around pacing (plot structures have always been my weakest element of writing), and the errant typo or two. Things I’d need to buff out and polish, but that didn’t totally fridge the game, thankfully. The major bits were mostly related to programming, which I anticipated- I am very new to it!
I had a lot of fun making Sweetpea. I would like to enter next year’s SpringThing again, maybe with that survival horror romance I’ve got simmering in the background… It was really cool getting feedback from the forums. I’m still too afraid to enter IFComp (and I don’t think the sorts of things I make would rank well in it anyways), but I had enough of a good time I’d consider giving it another go.